Daughter of former Brown masters passes away

By Sarah Rutledge     8/28/08 7:00pm

Emma Hutchinson, daughter of former Brown College masters John and Paula Hutchinson, died Saturday after a long battle with polycystic kidney disease. She was 20 years old.The Rice Memorial Center provided 600 chairs in the Grand Hall for Hutchinson's memorial service Tuesday afternoon. Every seat was taken.

Hutchinson grew up on the Rice campus, since her parents became masters of Wiess College when she was six years old. The Hutchinsons would later relocate to Brown, so Emma spent more than 10 years living on the Rice campus, interacting with students, faculty and staff.

John Hutchinson said the Wiess community was happy to adopt Emma as the baby of the college.

---

---

One year, at Beer Bike, an elementary-age Emma Hutchinson rode the anchor leg for the Wiess women's bike race.

"It was one of those magical moments where students from all over the colleges, even though they were cheering for own colleges, collectively started cheering for her even though she was riding for Wiess," John Hutchinson said.

Emma Hutchinson was not afraid to be in the spotlight. While still in elementary school, she performed alongside Rice students in college productions of Fiddler on the Roof, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Wiess' own Hello, Hamlet! A student of violin and piano, she played the violin in front of Wiess students and once sang The Dixie Chicks' "Goodbye, Earl" to an audience at CoffeeHouse.

Hutchinson also was an avid athlete who participated in the colleges' intramural sports and took tennis lessons. She was such a huge fan of Rice women's tennis team that she became its unofficial mascot, John Hutchinson said. She continued to play tennis for the rest of her life.

When the Hutchinsons become Brown masters, Emma Hutchinson was already in high school. But this offered her an opportunity to seek advice from Brown students as peers, who gave her invaluable college guidance, John Hutchinson said.

"This helped her gain immense confidence to help her go off to college on her own," he said. "I think she went off to college at Trinity [College] more ready to be a college student than anyone ever could, because the students [at Brown] treated her as one of their own, so she knew how it was going to be."

Emma Hutchinson made fast friends not only with the students at Rice, but also the staff and especially members of Rice University Police Department, who watched out for her as she crossed the campus.

Her outgoing personality served her well in college, where she thoroughly enjoyed her academic and extracurricular pursuits.

"She was one of those rare students who loved every aspect of he college life," John Hutchinson said. "She loved the college life, food, loved studying, loved her professors, loved her friends and her sorority, and she lived her college life as fully as any student ever would because she loved Trinity so much."

This quest for learning stemmed from an early age. When Emma Hutchinson had a day off from school, she would frequently sit in on her father's chemistry lectures. Once, when John Hutchinson was teaching the class Lewis structures of molecules and answering questions, Emma Hutchinson began to draw an impeccable Lewis structure on the overhead projector.

"She was just enjoying listening to what all the students in class were talking about and wanted to show that she had learned it too," he said.

Since Saturday, a Facebook group, "Team Emma," was begun by a Rice alumna. As of Wednesday night, 295 users had joined the group.

---